Let’s Talk About Sex

As an online companion piece to W magazine’s annual Best Performances issue, the magazine’s editor at large, Lynn Hirschberg, sat down with thirty-one Hollywood actors for a series of off-the-cuff video interviews. This year, Hirschberg asked the selected coterie to talk about their favorite cinema sex scenes. The stars’ selections varied (not all of them strictly speaking sex scenes), and among them were a number of great moments in Criterion films—from the chaste love affair of David Lean’s Brief Encounter to the violent eroticism of Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses. Below are a few of our favorites from the series: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Benicio del Toro, Paul Dano, and Greta Gerwig—and you can view the rest of the videos over at the magazine’s website.

Greta Gerwig on David Lean’s Brief Encounter and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now

Benicio del Toro on Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night

Jennifer Jason Leigh on Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses

Paul Dano on Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious